Thursday, 3 December 2009

The following information is gleaned from four pathfinders placed online by Library and Archives Canada as part of their Modernization initiative.

Canada's Military Documentary Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities

- unprecedented volumes of personal photography and video resulting from military operations, to social spaces unique to Canadian Forces members, to blogs commenting on every aspect of life in the forces. YouTube offers a simple quantifiable measure of this point: on October 26, 2009, there were 4,180 videos tagged "Canada Afghanistan".

- There will be an entirely new and unique set of problems in storing, preserving, and providing timely access to the 28 kilometres of Second World War service records that will become archival on April 1, 2010.

- photographs recently transferred from the National Defence Image Library ... took place with the explicit understanding that LAC would not retain all of these images. The expectation is that a significant number of the images will be offered to member institutions of the Military Museums of Canada.

- Based on circulation statistics through 2008-2009, military and war related records and private papers represent approximately a third of all materials circulated. This number does not include the approximate 60,000 requests for dormant service files, or publications, for which there are no statistics.

Long-Term Loans: A Client-Focused Collaborative Approach

(none)

Rethinking the Stewardship of Newspapers in a Digital Age

- LAC maintains subscriptions to 10 Canadian dailies which, according to a policy established in 1969, it retains in print form as a representative archival sample of Canadian major newspapers in French and English from different parts of Canada. These titles are currently bundled and stored in offsite storage facilities. The current subscription cost for these 10 dailies is $6,781 per year.

- In addition to the 10 dailies, LAC subscribes to 171 Canadian print newspapers at a cost of $32,740 per year. These subscriptions include: 107 multicultural newspapers, 17 Aboriginal newspapers, and 47 other titles representing various cities and communities from across Canada. The print versions of the 47 representative titles are discarded once the microfilm versions are received. LAC also collects a selection of non-subscription university student, multicultural, and community newspapers.

- LAC has received one-time special funding from the Government of Canada to convert an industrial building into a collection facility, and this will house the LAC newspaper collection. The print newspaper collection will be moved at the beginning of 2012. The move of this collection will cost an estimated $500,000 ...

- All Canadian newspapers published in microform after 1988 are subject to legal deposit....LAC purchases titles filmed for preservation purposes (and) ... spends more than $90,000 per year on newspapers on microform.

- the de facto guideline for considering newspapers copyright clear in Canada has been 90 years, and so, memory institutions have tended to concentrate on digitizing newspaper content published before 1920.

- The LAC newspaper collection ... constitutes one of the most heavily used parts of the LAC collection.

Exposing Union Catalogue Metadata Via Third Parties

- For more than 50 years, Canadian libraries have voluntarily contributed their bibliographic metadata to the Union Catalogue ... (which) ... features approximately 65 million library holdings and 23 million bibliographic records.